In many system environments, configuration information is associated with two or more communicating devices. In some such systems, one device originates the configuration information, and one or more other devices use the configuration information. The configuration information is often time varying in nature. One example of such a system is a provisioned networking environment. One system in the networking environment communicates configuration information to other systems in the networking environment. The configuration information may be related, for example, to communications paths employed by users to reach an originating network element, or for service parameters associated with those paths, or the like. Such paths occur for example in various networking tunneling protocols such as MPLS, BGP VPNs, Pseudo-wire, etc.
In such systems, it would be advantageous to be able to verify that the configuration information used by a system is in fact the correct configuration information, and to verify that system connectivity is similarly correct. In the network system example, it would be advantageous to be able to verify that the configuration information used by a user network element is consistent with the configuration information that was actually issued to it by the originating network element.